Final tid bit. Paul and I were having a side discussion about online media and it's always a good idea to store any files you store online in a safe place at home as well as you can't trust any company to keep your files safe. I got burned three years ago after using Apple's iDrive online service. I stored all my work documents there. Well, Apple got rid of the service and after a few months they deleted all files. I lost a ton of stuff. Now I store everything on multiple drives in addition to online as drives fail as well, including flash drives, which ironically have a higher failure rate than traditional drives although they don't have any moving parts! I avoid storing any data on writable discs because those have a limited lifespan, usually a few years.

For photos, I keep the RAW image file only and toss away the JPEGs. Nikon calls it NEF and Canon's version is called CR2. These are much more useful than JPEG images because the raw file consists of literally a black and white image and then all the photo attributes are stored separately, as metadata. The advantage of this is that if in the future you want to make "corrections" to the image, all you need to do is open the file in photo editing software and adjust the attributes to get the effect you want ... the modern day version of a photo lab. You can't do that with a JPEG image as those are finalized images. Also JPEG images are compressed while raw images are not, so you don't lose any quality. However, having said all this to the naked eye, it would be very difficult to distinguish between a raw image file and a high quality JPEG, which is why even professional photographers sometimes rely only on high end JPEGs. However, no JPEG can beat RAW.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 10/20/2013 01:03AM by mohave.